Baby, you were born this way

Sexual orientation begins in the womb, neuroscientist says

Lady Gaga (pictured) has it right when it comes to the roots of sexual orientation, Freud had it dead wrong.

Photograph by: Kazuhiro Nogi
, AFP/Getty IMages

Lady Gaga has it right, Freud had it dead wrong.

When it comes to sexual orientation — and homosexuality in particular — it turns out that Freud and others who theorized that it stems from early parental relationships, childhood abuse or choice were traipsing up the wrong path.

According to pioneering British-American neuroscientist, Simon LeVay (and Lady Gaga), the answer is simple: Baby, you were born this way.

"Sexual orientation is an aspect of gender that emerges from the prenatal sexual differentiation of the brain," says LeVay, who was one of the first researchers in 1991 to connect brain development to sexual orientation. "Whether a person is gay or straight depends in large part on how this process of biological differentiation goes forward, with the lead actors being genes, sex hormones and the brain systems that are influenced by them."

In fact, an increasing body of research, which LeVay deftly explores in his latest book Gay, Straight and the Reason Why (Oxford University Press, 2011), completely overturns traditional beliefs that homosexuality is either a psychological issue, the result of sexual assault as a child or even a matter of choice.

And it’s a position that’s bound to make waves, says Queen’s University psychology researcher Dr. Meredith Chivers. "Simon’s research is definitely pioneering — he was the first to look at gay/straight brain differences — and controversial in that sexual orientation is associated with brain structure differences. But he is a highly respected scientist in his field."

And he’s not above tackling another respected scientist.

In Freud’s case, LeVay says, "He constructed this adventurous story about what happens to sexuality when you’re young children. He thought of homosexuality as arrested development. Those ideas were to dominate in much of the 20th century. So many gay men in the ’60s underwent psychoanalysis with the idea of overcoming their sexuality. there are many sad stories about how traumatic it was."

Such theories also mesh with the notion that homosexuality is the result of early sexual trauma. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, there were 2,607 substantiated cases of child sexual abuse in 2008. Actual cases may be higher; between 1998 and 2003, Internet child pornography went up by 900 per cent, says Statistics Canada. So while some lesbians molested as children believe it plays a role in their emerging sexuality, child sex abuse is so common "one would expect more lesbians than straight women to report having been abused," LeVay says. "In a study that compared matched pairs of lesbians and straight women, no such difference existed."

And while a 2004 Los Angeles Times poll of Americans found one-third believe homosexuality is a matter of choice, just four per cent of gay men and 15 per cent of lesbians felt choice had anything to do with it, according to 1994 and 1995 RAND Institute studies.

"But there is a huge element of choice in what you do with your sexual orientation," LeVay adds. "It’s much deeper than people saying ’I think I’ll try that gay thing this weekend.’"

The biology of homosexuality

In fact, some neuroscientists and psychologists theorize that sexual orientation has its roots long before a baby is born. In utero, a male fetus is bathed in testosterone, which influences the development of genitals and brain structures that govern things like communication and fight or flight responses.

"In humans, testosterone is the major hormone responsible for sexual differentiation during early development," LeVay says. "The brain starts off rather the same way and develops in a more male or female direction under the influence of testosterone, which comes from the developing testes. If testosterone levels during a critical prenatal period are high, the brain is organized in such a way that the person is predisposed to become typically masculine in a variety of gendered traits, including sexual attraction to females. If testosterone levels are low during that same period, the brain is organized in such a way that the person is predisposed to become typically feminine in gendered traits, including sexual attraction to males. Bisexuality might result from intermediate levels of testosterone, although there is little direct evidence bearing on this."

Chivers agrees there is little to support the theory. "There is so little research, it’s hard to say whether bisexual attractions would be associated with intermediate levels of testosterone."

Yet there are other factors, too. Family and twin studies examining the role of genes have found that "estimates of the heritability of homosexuality have been quite variable, but range around 30 to 50 per cent for both sexes, which is similar to the heritability estimates for many other psychological traits," LeVay says. Yet science has not yet identified a single "gay gene." Rather, like psychological traits, sexuality may be influenced by several combinations of "gay genes," which would also explain different types of homosexuality, such as "butch" or "femme" lesbians as well as some innate characteristics.

Randomness also plays a role. A New York University study that examined identical twins with gay or straight orientation discovered that the lesbian twin had higher levels of testosterone than her heterosexual sister. "In other words, the same biological factor — prenatal testosterone levels — appears to guide the development of sexual orientation in discordant twins (with different sexual orientation) as it does in gay and straight people generally, but in the case of these twins there is no ultimate cause, such as genetic differences. Rather," LeVay says, "it is as if a biological coin had been tossed."

While the connections between biology and sexual orientation are relatively clear for men, the same is not always true of lesbians and heterosexual women. A study conducted by the BBC asked men and women to self-identify on a masculine or feminine continuum. On average, homosexuals felt themselves to be less masculine than heterosexuals. Yet for women, sexual orientation appears to be more fluid, possibly because female sexuality in general is more tied to relationships and emotional connections, says Chivers. In her studies, during which participants were shown sexual films of men and women and their genital arousal measured, men strongly responded to the sex they preferred, but women did not.

"The surprising finding that we obtained and has been reproduced by others is that women’s patterns of sexual response don’t correspond as strongly as men. For example, if they watch films of nude men and women, their physiological response is indistinguishable, regardless that they identify as straight. Lesbians are more aroused by women, but still show a response to the male stimuli, as well."

Chivers adds that, while that doesn’t mean all women are really bisexual, it does mean sexual cues for women may be broader than in men. "There’s lot you can make of it from an evolutionary perspective of what this might mean," she says, "but we just don’t understand very well what the relationship is between sexual response and attraction in women."

The bottom line, says LeVay, is that while biology sets the stage for sexual orientation, "you can’t just automatically draw parallels between sexual orientation in men and women. There are broad advances in the entire area of sexual orientation, but it’s very much a work in progress."

Whether the result of testosterone, genetics or random chance, sexual orientation impacts a whole range of traits. In some instances, researchers say gay men tend to shift toward the feminine in innate characteristics, while lesbians shift toward the masculine.

In studies in Canada, the U.S. and Britain between 1991 and 2007 that examined the ability to tell if complex objects are the same from different angles, straight men outperformed gay men, who performed better than lesbians. Lesbians also beat straight women.

A 1995 study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientists found that gay men were worse at throwing a ball at a target, while lesbians were better than straight women.

While women are generally more verbally fluent than men due to differences in brain structures which are affected by testosterone in utero, British researcher Qazi Rahman’s work discovered lesbians score significantly worse than straight women and about the same as straight men. Gay men do the opposite; they perform as well as straight women and far better than straight men.

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